Friday, November 24, 2017

England's difficulty is Ireland's ... fault?

Ruth Dudley Edwards, taking a Sun-level of analysis to the opinion pages of the Financial Times --

For reasons to do with Ireland’s complex electoral system of proportional representation and multi-seat constituencies, Mr Coveney [Irish foreign minister] keeps a nervous eye on the competition and courts the green vote, which has caused him to push a nationalist agenda and make bellicose statements about Brexit that Mr Varadkar [PM] began to echo. On Wednesday, Mr Coveney chose a Northern Ireland business breakfast to emphasise what had previously been hinted at: that Ireland is right behind EU negotiators in refusing to go to the next stage of the talks without progress on the rights of EU citizens, the financial settlement and the border. It is prepared to use its veto if necessary, and, for now is insisting that the border should be somewhere in the Irish Sea, leaving Northern Ireland de facto still in the EU. Apart from being anathema to unionists, as Ray Bassett, a rare dissenting voice among retired senior Irish diplomats, put it, “the demand that Britain will be economically dismembered, with the North staying in the customs union while the rest of Britain goes its own way, is universally seen as undeliverable by any British government”. The UK accounts for 14 per cent of Irish exports and 25 per cent of Irish imports and there is additionally a high volume of services trade between the two countries. What people like Mr Bassett and Graham Gudgin of the think-tank Policy Exchange point out is that trade with Britain as a whole is infinitely more important to Ireland than that with Northern Ireland in particular.

It's all there: the bizarre analysis that a Fine Gael-led government is driven by an ultra-nationalist flank, that Ireland's position on Brexit only suddenly emerged last week, a quote from a man with an ostensible credential but zero expertise on multilateral trade and relations, Ray Bassett, dubious conclusions from trade statistics, blaming Ireland for a British desire to leave the Customs Union, no actual solution offered (she calls for imagination), and later down in the column, a fusing of pro-Brexit accommodation with anti-austerity tropes -- two days after Philip Hammond's budget shows what Brexit budgets are going to look like.

The train has unfortunately already left the station in terms of the access of these wreckers and hucksters to the media, but the least response might be to resolve that general election analysis, if there is a general election, will be scrutinized particularly closely for influence of  opportunistic and delusional agitation from the gallery.

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